Edited transcript of the round table discussion about the work of Simon Hantaï held at the French Institute, 3 June 2014 François Rouan, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Mick Finch, Philip Armstrong, Stuart Elliot, Andy Harper, Laura Lisbon and Daniel Sturgis.

The round table discussed the work of the Hungarian painter Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) has gained increasing recognition in the last few years, particularly in terms of major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Villa Medici in Rome as well as an important exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. After Hantaï moved to France in 1949, the series of paintings he made from the 1960s on – where processes of folding were materially at the heart of his practice – became a major and continuing influence on successive generations of French artists.